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Hurricane flashback: Island a ‘ghost town’ on eve of Andrew

Twenty years ago on Wednesday, residents of coastal Palm Beach County woke up to some disturbing news: Hurricane Andrew was closing in, and the National Hurricane Center predicted it would strike Florida on Saturday just north of Palm Beach.

That evening, NHC forecasters issued a hurricane watch for the state’s East Coast from Titusville all the way south to the Florida Keys.

The next day, forecasters began nudging the expected landfall south, but no one was certain exactly where landfall might occur during the final days of that tense week. The hurricane watch was changed to a warning from Vero Beach to the Keys.

It was clear by Saturday that Hurricane Andrew would hit South Florida, probably near Miami. After sailing through the decade of the 1980s with few hurricane threats, South Floridians took this one seriously, boarding up businesses and homes and stocking up on supplies.

Everyone’s preparation skills, however, were a little rusty. The Palm Beach Daily News called Hurricane Andrew “a slave driver,” forcing business owners to “board up windows, take down awnings and move merchandise to higher shelves.”

One business owner complained: “We tried to put up the shutters, but they didn’t work. They’re 40 years old.”

In South Florida, 1.2 million people were evacuated, including the entire Town of Palm Beach. The order came at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday and police blocked traffic from coming onto the island from the three bridges and on the South End. For the next 24 hours, Palm Beach “was like a ghost town,” a police official said.

Andrew made landfall at Elliot Key at 3:40 a.m. Monday with sustained winds of 165 mph, one of only three Category 5 storms in recorded history to hit the United States. The other two were the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane that slammed the Keys, and 1969’s powerhouse Hurricane Camille, which struck the Gulf Coast in Mississippi with wind gusts of 200 mph.

It took 10 years for Andrew to be upgraded to a Category 5, however, since initial estimates put maximum wind speed at 145 mph during its Florida landfall.

Palm Beach, and the county in general, was spared by the fact that Andrew was an unusually compact hurricane. Highest sustained winds at Palm Beach International Airport were 49 mph, and rainfall amounts maxed out at around 5 inches in southern parts of the county.

On the island, Andrew caused minor damage, including downed trees and power lines. Parts of Palm Beach were without power from midnight to 1 a.m. as Andrew neared the coast. The storm stripped leaves from trees and blew sand onto A1A.

Refugees from Miami-Dade County streamed into Palm Beach hotels in the aftermath of the storm, arriving in shorts and T-shirts and checking into The Ritz-Carlton and The Chesterfield. Some of the hotels offered them discounts and bent dress code rules.

But even residents of Broward County and the City of Miami felt they lucked out with Andrew, since the eye went over Homestead. Hurricane-force winds extended only about 35 miles from the center.

“It’s really important to understand that the core didn’t go over the City of Miami, the Port of Miami, or the financial area,” said Max Mayfield, a forecaster with the National Hurricane Center in 1992. “The core was south, so just the slightest shift in the track 15-20 miles north, as bad as Andrew was — and I sure wouldn’t want to minimize it — it could have been much worse.”

Mayfield, who served as the center’s director from 2000-2007, spoke at a July 24 teleconference where key players for the center discussed the storm.

Mayfield recalled the forecasting challenges for Hurricane Andrew, which originally rolled off the coast of Africa on Aug. 14 as a tropical wave. It became a depression two days later and a named storm on Aug. 17. But dry air and wind shear tore at the structure of Andrew and it was nearly downgraded.

“The first named storm of the year, you’re always a little nervous about it dissipating,” Mayfield said. “Of course, a week later I was praying it was going to dissipate.”

Palm Beach Police Capt. Jeffrey Trylch, who joined the department in 1986, was one of nine officers from the department dispatched to Miami-Dade County to help reinforce local officers struggling to keep order in a devastated city. They were looking for looters, breaking up fights and responding to burglary calls.

“We ran call-to-call,” Trylch said in an interview. “We had to quell a near-riot at one of the social services offices where they were handing out food stamps. There were hundreds of people in line, and of course no air-conditioning.

“Nobody had power, so everyone was outside, wandering the streets and finding different ways to stay cool.

“We actually went down in a motor home that one of the officers owned. We stayed in the parking lot at Joe Robbie Stadium. When we were out during the day working, the night team was in there sleeping. When we got off at night, they were on their way to work.”

Homestead, he said, “looked like a war zone — total devastation. If it hadn’t been for the roads you could see, you’d never even know there were structures there. It was like a wasteland with piles and piles of trash, which in some cases were homes. One or two of the officers I was working with had lost their homes. They still had to continue working and worry about that later. Their families were in shelters.”

Burglaries are taken seriously in Palm Beach and get immediate attention, but Trylch found out that the whole law enforcement outlook was different after Andrew roared through.

“I put cuffs on one guy who had broken into this place,” Trylch said. “I was with a Miami detective and to me, when you have a guy who broke into a place you arrest him. But the bigger picture from the detective’s point of view was, this is a very minor incident compared to what else is going on out there.

“And apparently the guy had been looking for food, so he let him go. We could have been tied up for hours on something like this when we were needed on the street.”

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